Controlling surface alignment on nanoscopically tailored competing domains

The alignment of the liquid crystal on the alignment layer is determined by the anchoring energy and the elastic energy. In the case of uniform alignm ent, the anchoring energy generally overwhelms the elastic energy to make a n uniform alignment over all the area. But the behavior of the liquid cryst al on artificially designed multi-domains system with competing directions of easy axis can be different. The competition between two factors is expec ted to force the system to stabilize in the balanced configuration that cou ld be different from which is induced microscopically by the anchoring ener gy. We used an atomic force microscopy (AFM) to create micron and nanometer siz e multi-domains with two alignment directions. With changing the domain siz e, we observed a variety of different behavior of the liquid crystal textur e.